Did you know that? If you have a camera, you can make great images. The only thing holding you back is you. If you can't see, you can't possibly shoot. (Ever heard of a blind photographer? Exactly.) If you can see the image before you even press the shutter, then you have a lot of work to do.

I was reading a National Geographic magazine today, and studying the pictures, they were grainy, had purple fringing, and chromatic abbreviation, but the colors looked amazing, the light looked amazing, and the composition was great, looking up into the canopy of a rain-forest with a wide angle perspective. The shot was most likely done on a Nikon D70 or a D100.

In the same magazine was an advertisement for the D90, using Ashton Kutcher and a real photographer as their spokes person. Now, Ashton is a nice, funny guy, but he's also an actor. Did you notice that on the website ashtonsd90.com there are no pictures that Ashton himself took? Another thing, int he advertisement, the real photographer was talking about light, and how if you want great images, you need to shoot them at dawn. He never said that he needed the D90 to make those images, but that the D90 was convenient and at least worked when he wanted it to.

You can look through my images. If you notice, my most popular image was taken with a $200 point and shoot from 2005. My other popular images were taken with an Canon A710 from 2007. Out of 24 of my most popular images, only 5 of them were taken with my D40.

Take a look at this image
A DD, from a D70, with most undoubtedly the kit lens.

[link] is my friend Vivian. She's using a EOS 300D, also known as the Digital Rebel. Note, this is not the xt, xti, xts, xxx, this is the FIRST digital rebel, and the first one to use EF-S lenses, and she also uses the first 18-55mm EF-S lens Canon ever made. I think she's doing pretty good, considering she's not really that technical of a photographer. She just takes pictures, and doesn't worry about weird techniques.

[link] is another friend of mine, named Pante. He uses a lot of different cameras, but look at his main ones: a Lomo fisheye, a Pentax K1000, and a Nikon FM-10. The FM-10 is a fully manual camera (which is still made today, might I add.) But look at the images he took of the band Silverada; do you think you could do that with a camera fully manual?

I learned of [link] from someone working at a local Ritz camera. We were talking about how megapixels don't really matter, and how she with her D40 was taking pictures more insane than he was with his D300. She spent her money on lenses that were either third-party or weren't fully functional with the D40, and he spent his on his body. I think that if he had to start over again, he would veer to her route.

Has anyone else ever seen people who own a Canon 40D or a 50D, but they don't know the first thing about taking pictures? They use plastic kit lenses or lenses that don't cover a useful focal range on digital, and work that pop up flash to death, never touch the ISO, and their pictures look like crap. Their images are crap because they only know megapixels, because it's a number they can relate to, even though they don't even know what it means or how it has to deal with performance. This is 18+ type material here, but I once heard on the radio that a woman preferred men who were smaller in the basement, because they worked harder when it came time to use it than those who were much larger. Don't get caught up in looking at numbers, because numbers don't dictate performance.

Advertising is a funny thing. It's sole purpose is to convince you that the reason why you aren't satisfied in life is because you haven't bought this jack-of-all-trades item to do everything with, that magical miracle allergy drug that makes you feel like you're euphoric, that cleaner to clean away the invisible scum on your kitchen counter, that tiny pill to make that little something a bit bigger... But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I've shown you a lot of pudding that appears to be very undesirable, but in reality it's some of the best equipment you can use.

If you're considering buying a camera, think about this: the two top most expensive consumer cameras right now are the Nikon D3 and the Canon 1Ds MkIII, at $4500 and $7200 respectively. If you spent all your money on just those bodies alone, what kind of images could you take? Now imagine that you spent that money on a D40, a xsi, maybe even the e420, or better yet an old Canon film Rebel or the Nikon film N80. The rest of the money is spent on large aperture primes, ultra wide angle lenses, and pro telephoto zooms. Maybe throw in a nice filter pack, a flash with a chord to get your light off camera, and whatever leftover on a vacation. Now what images could you make?